


The Wallpaper

by hauntedmusings



Category: Changeling: The Lost, World of Darkness (Games)
Genre: Dissociation, Experimental Style, Gen, I Dont Know What Genre Of Horror Includes Being Made Into Furniture, Loss of Identity, Out of Body Experiences, Psychological Trauma, Surreal, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 10:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29540922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hauntedmusings/pseuds/hauntedmusings
Summary: A piece written from the perspective of a Changeling who was made to stand still and hold up the weight his True Fae's table for 40 years, and the ways his mind did (or did not) survive.
Kudos: 2





	The Wallpaper

"I played games with the wallpaper," He says, one night, when someone tries to ask him about what happened, what he did the whole time. His voice wobbles in his throat as he answers, and it comes out sounding like it’s miles away. He catches the concern in the eyes of the person he’s speaking to- He wants to say his head is foggy when he says this, but, truth be told, it's as lucid as he's ever been, since his escape. 

_I played games with the wallpaper._ What he means is - _I played games with my memory._ How much is there to do, sitting in one spot for eternity? Games with memory were the first games he played. The rules were simple - stare into the wallpaper. Stare into it, and memorize its crevices and patterns. Memorize how the light hits the satin damask decals, how it's ever so slightly shinier on the pattern than the rest of the pale matte paper. Memorize how the wallpaper curls when it meets the wood paneling, at the seam where it overlaps itself. Sometimes there's shadows, shadows from structures and furniture behind him. The shape and angle of the shadows tells him what time it is. Remember them. You see that crack along the wood? It's subtle, but it's there. Remember it, too. Remember every bulge and every curl. Remember the bruises and blemishes of the walls. The walls may seem perfect on first glance, but they are only perfect to a stranger. He had come to know them intimately. Take a microscope to anything and there's bumps, there's defects, there’s tiny tears and theres stains and there’s ways to mark the landscape. Let those shapes, those bumps and those patterns and those imperfections along this ornate, and extravagant world sink into your mind - then close your eyes. Don’t open them. Picture what's in front of you. Picture it all in your head. Picture the walls, picture the lanes and avenues of it’s patterns, picture the curve of the wood panels and picture the shadows. Adjust the shadows for an extra challenge, if enough time passes with your eyes closed. Picture it. Make it so vivid you could touch it. Imagine yourself touching it, if you must. The wallpaper is _so_ impossibly far away, all the way at the edge of the world- but you remember what touch is, don’t you? Don’t get distracted. What’s important is that you place it all _correctly._ It's like drawing- except you never have to pick up a pencil. You just arrange it all in your mind, line it all up perfectly, picture it _so clearly_ that its like you never closed your eyes in the first place.

Then, open your eyes. Is reality like how you remember it being? 

"Like a magic eye poster - do you remember those?" Is how he'd start, laughing with uncertainty. He never understood why he laughed anymore, his voice barely even sounded like it belonged to him, old and tired and ragged. He’d start with that example when the words to communicate the scope of it all seemed too far away for people to relate to. Magic eye posters existed to him before the wallpaper, therefore, he reasoned, they existed to other people, too. He remembered being in kindergarten, and leaning over the magic eye books, turning the pages with hands that were still small and soft. Each one was a mess of color, completely incomprehensible. Then, one day, he crossed his eyes a little and images erupted from the page. Suddenly, he was hooked- these books had _secrets,_ a hidden language of images, and he knew how to understand them. Sometimes, when walking around town, he’d spy two objects of similar shape sitting next to each other, and he’d cross his vision again- and watch with glee as space warped around him, curving around the objects in focus. He did it so often, he started getting headaches. His mother used to tell him that’s why he needed glasses, that he ruined his eyes on those magic eye books. But he never regretted it. Not as a kid, anyway.

"Do you remember those books? With those weird looking, busy pages of color? You'd let your eyes go crossed and fuzzy, the patterns would blend together, and something 3 dimensional and strange would suddenly rise out of the pages. You stare at something so long, it… it just…"

At some point, after his eyes had bored into the wallpaper long enough, bored so hard they might have pierced holes into it with the intensity of the stare, the damask pattern stopped being recognizable. It stopped being a friend, stopped being something he knew anything about. The decorative satin lining of the walls, it's swirls and swoops began to ache in his eyes. The pattern became hostile. The pattern _hurt_ . Looking at it _hurt._ Being there _hurt_ . He was never sure how to describe this part - the part where the march of time spent in utter quiet felt just as painful as any lash or bullet. His spine creaked forward, inch by inch, break by break. His back had gone numb to the weight of it all. The weight of time felt all the same. It kept piling on, layer by layer, hour by hour. Every passing second became another reminder that he was _here._ That his life was being spent up _here._ And the wallpaper- the wallpaper _knew_ this.

You look closely for long enough, and the static turns to shapes. He kept his eyes on the walls, and they never changed an inch - yet he _swore_ they told him stories.

This is where the second game came in. The game of stepping out of his body, of the outline of himself lifting up and wandering off without him. _Remember when you thought about touching the walls?_ Come back to that thought. It’s a dangerous thought, but you’ve memorized the walls enough. The game of memory is pointless by now. There is nothing left for you to do there. This time, when you close your eyes, imagine something _different_ . Take the vivid image in your head, and change it. Make it blue, make the floor green, make it smell like grass and summer air. Make the ceiling taller. Maybe there’s no walls after all. Then- and here’s the most dangerous part of all- Imagine yourself leaving. Shed the anchor of your physical form. Leave it where it is, it’s useless now. Stand up- have the outline that _is_ you and not the outline that is your body stand up and touch the blue walls. Touch the sky. Do you remember how, when you were little, your sister used to tell you you could touch the moon if you tried? Do you remember your sister? Do that- take yourself to the moon, maybe you’ll find that she’s waiting there for you. Make it vivid, make it real. The moon is a big place- it’s okay if you don’t find her right away, you have much exploring to do. When you find her, you’ll have all the Christmases, all the Birthdays, all the afternoon chats and sudden brunch escapades, and you can finally catch up on all the _many, many things_ you missed. 

You could live whole lifetimes with your eyes closed.

The vast expanse of the moon is much more interesting than wherever you left your numb body. Grey dust kicks up below your feet, sparkling in the light of the sun. It's the same sun here as it is back home. Look up. Look up and see the planet Earth, from your spot on the moon. He recalled seeing satellite images of how the earth looked in class, but he took them for granted. The swirling blue and green marble against a backdrop of black held only logistical significance to him. That couldn’t be a real picture of home, it was too far away, too small and messy and foreign to be where he lived. But he cherished those images now, he cherished his flimsy, paper-thin memories of the Earth, the snapshot taken from a distance.

Open your eyes again.

Back to reality, the infinite void of the night sky shifted, but only in color, not in depth. Eyes wide open, the damask wallpaper felt like the vast and endless void of space. It repeated forever. Forever. And ever. Time and infinity are maddening concepts, and the wallpaper felt like eternity. What was that quote, about gazing into something and it gazing back? The longer he stared at the walls, the more the edges of his vision blurred. He could turn his head, sure- and perhaps the wallpaper would change, perhaps more of the world would reveal itself to him, but that location in space didn’t exist to him anymore beyond shadows and footsteps. The outside had stopped being tangible long ago. There was the window, sure- his eyes could catch the edges of the window, if he pushed them to the very edge of their vision. Sometimes there was snow. Sometimes there was rain. But he didn’t need to see the outside to count the passing of the seasons, the march of day and night- he could feel the sunlight on his back, could feel the air cool as night came, and the house sang with rainfall. The seasons were much the same- the first winter was hard, he had to train himself not to shiver. But the outside wasn’t _real._ Not to him. Not anymore. How could one fathom an outside, anyway? Was there not infinite depth to this room? The world of the room had become so big. His eyes had explored every crevice, every inch between him and the rest of the walls felt like miles and lightyears- How could there be more than just _one_? His memories must be false. He was never a person, he never sat on that kindergarten floor, his mother never held him and his fiance never laughed as he took the glasses off his face and his sister never showed him the moon.

 _Am I a person?_ The question lingered in his head. _Am I alive? Does any of this count as alive?_

“Y-You stare at something long enough, it- _changes,_ it becomes something _different,_ you know?”

 _I played games with the wallpaper,_ and what is implied that he doesn’t feel the need to say is, _the wallpaper felt like another person._ And why wouldn’t it be a person? If he could count as furniture, can’t the walls be alive, too? They _changed_ like they were alive. You stare at something for long enough and the patterns start to wriggle, your eyesight itches for something new and the lines itch with them. Was that them itching to move, like him? Was that his eyes playing tricks? Or was it similar to how the teacups clattered on his back every so often, similar to the days when his tired, ragged body tried to quit and collapse into the floorboards? When his knees wobbled with sleepless stress, when the muscles that had gone numb shook with fragile weariness? Were the patterns and swooping lines itching to move, too? Were they itching to run? Did they know how to run anymore? Had their legs frozen in place, had their bodies not been stolen and flattened, transposed as patterns onto the unforgiving walls? How could he know what was and was not alive in this house, this haunted dwelling where bone met wood? The ghosts of this mansion were just like any home. He could hear them. He could hear the voices in the wallpaper, it sang with the ringing in his ears. The house was _alive._ Everything was _alive._

“Or maybe- I don’t know, the way _you_ see it changes. Maybe- maybe _you_ change, and _it_ doesn’t.” He’s still talking to this person, but he’s not here, not really. He knows his eyes are open but it doesn't feel that way. ”That… probably makes more sense, doesn’t it? But I don’t _know_ , I don’t know for certain, because nothing in Arcadia makes _sense._ You start to feel as stiff as a board and you look down and your legs are made of wood. How is that possible? Do you know how that’s possible? I don't know what changes make _sense_ anymore. Am I crazy? Was the wallpaper like me, or am I crazy? If it was like me, then I wasn't alone, right? _Right?_ Do you know what I _mean?"_

The person who asked the question backs away. Of course they don’t know, of course they don’t understand. Even if they could, the words he used never described it right. He had forgotten how to talk like a person did, how to speak sanely and human. Everyone around him had gone on being human this whole time, but not him. Worst of them all- he had forgotten that the things that played out behind his eyes, his thoughts out there in the distance of his mind were _relevant_ , that those things were _real._ Years of training himself to be blind to his own mind had served him well, but it was a crutch now that he was expected to be human. He had forgotten how to talk, how to communicate, how to spin language into something that made _sense._ Why did things have to stop making sense? He missed the days he knew how to talk, the days when he could stand on a stage and speak publicly reliably, the days when he could so much as look his waiter in the eyes while they took his order, the days when people would ask him for his name and it occurred to him to say it back. His definition of socializing for years had been listening in, while other people talk. It took him years to learn to speak again, to remember how to use his voice and the chords in his throat. It felt like the dust had settled inside him, too. He had to blow the dust off himself to figure out what was there, and what he was met with was an aching thing that had forgotten how to be a body. His bones creaked, his muscles ached. It all _ached_.

In the decades of his trial he had grown comfortable in his stiffness. Originally, his bones felt as though they were going to shatter and break when he told them to move. He recalled nights before as his muscles quivered weakly, forgetting how to move under the weight of his confinement. He witnessed his own struggling arms and suddenly felt so far away, as far away as the moon, as far away as his kindergarten books- because he felt internally as if he were moving _mountains_ , as if his muscles were strained against the whole of the world- but watching them, they only wobbled, small and helpless, barely a threat, barely noticeable at all. 

He remembered the day he stood up as if it were made of fire. Joints creaking, back groaning- his legs felt like impossible objects, mechanical and foreign and _wrong_ . When he made it out of the hedge, his body collapsed. No visible wounds, but everything _hurting,_ hurting because only now were they _allowed_ to hurt, allowed to sag and be pulled and beg for rest. The fire was more than just internal, it was like the very air itself itched and scorched at him. Atlas had been given a bed when he got back, but he couldn’t sleep in it. Not comfortably. He had forgotten how to sleep lying down. The most surreal part of the experience was waking up from his long, well deserved rest, and thinking he were back there, back under the table. As he grew conscious his body went still and waited for his _real_ eyes to open up, and show him that wallpaper again. Perhaps he had wandered off, like the time he visited the moon? Perhaps he wasn’t really here at all? That pale damask wallpaper that lived in infinity, the one with the satin texture patterns against a matte paper, the wallpaper he never got to touch, not really, not beyond the theater of his mind- he had spent so much time making it too vivid, too real. It was all etched in perfect condition behind his eyelids. He had escaped Arcadia, sure- but he _swore_ he saw it here, too. In the green of the streetlights, in the patterns of the sidewalk, in the faces of the people who found him lying there, motionless on the ground. The wallpaper was always there, behind his eyes. Maybe if he turned his head, he’d see it again. 

He sank onto the couch and stared at his hands, stared, _stared,_ felt his blood pooling and going cold and frozen again- and knew it was because he was preparing himself to be a statue again. His body didn’t get the memo he was free now. 

He closed his eyes. He felt the wallpaper breathing down his back. Damask patterns stormed behind his eyes, burned into his memory. 

He opened his eyes. He stared at his hands. He dimly realizes, he hadn’t seen them in 40 years.

Is reality like how you remember it being? 

Is it?

Is it?

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this experimental piece back in 2019 as my first dip into Changeling: The Lost. It still holds a place in my heart, as I was pretty deep in writer's block at the time, and writing a piece about the horror of being stationary unlocked the catharsis I needed to keep creating? Looking at it now, there are parts of this I sorta want to rewrite, but if I stopped to redo everything before it saw the light of day, I think I'd never post. Take it, and thanks for reading!


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